Added another test that deploys the Spring verticle, which creates the ApplicationContext, and another verticle to use it. It is a simple message test, but still has the app context to be null.
Some text had Red Hat in it, so I replaced it with my company
Interestingly, it worked deployed as a Verticle, but not as a Module.
More testing where I can access the ApplicationContext. And what is really interesting is that you have to deployModule and deployVerticle to get it to work.
I think I have this actually working now. Instead of making a Verticle to deploy and create an ApplicationContext and it have it stored in its static member. I just create a class that you call a static method on to create the ApplicationContext, and then at anytime after that call getApplicationContext() to retreive it.

Updated the README to show the usage.
Just checking if an ApplicationContext has already been created, why create another one.
== Not != in if statement
Converting to a system/lang module
Suggestions from David Peart.

"Another piece of feedback.

 I'd suggest you wrap a try/catch Throwable around the call to Spring to create the context.  I was getting problems seeing the spring thrown exception when running in vertx without this.  The spring log messages were not appearing through the vertx logger.

             try {
             	applicationContext = new AnnotationConfigApplicationContext(clazzes.toArray(new Class[] {}));
             } catch (Throwable e) {
             	logger.info("Error creating Spring Application Context", e);
             }

 David"

 That includes his other suggestions for clazzes.toArray taking new Class[] as a parameter.
With new classloading in Vert.x creating a sample parent module with Spring Data and Hibernate jars.
Allow addition of a Vert.x instance into the Spring context so that Vertx and the EventBus are available for autowiring into spring beans